Candid inquirers are becoming increasingly convinced that the true Renaissance occurred around the twelfth rather than the fifteenth century, that medieval Latin and scholasticism possessed great merits, that Gothic painting has been neglected just as Gothic architecture and sculpture once were, that democracy and popular education declined rather than advanced in early modern times, that organized charity and care for public health received much attention in medieval towns, whose unsanitary streets seem largely a figment of the modern imagination
